The next time you are cruising the aisles of your favorite retail venue, don’t be surprised if you get a text message from one of the sales associates on the floor. Salesfloor, billed as a technology platform for omnichannel retail associates, has just released a new mobile messaging feature. It now connects customers to local store associates with text messaging, and with this service, sales associates can make real-time product recommendations using SMS.

Salesfloor now makes it possible for associates to add clickable product recommendations to customers inside the store via secure text message. This new feature will also integrate with most popular messaging apps, including Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat. Salesfloor gives retailers yet another way to engage with customers who use their connected devices to shop.

Jetlore AI Maximizes B2C Sales Opportunities

Jetlore is a Bay Area based company that promises to provide a platform that can map consumer behavior into structured predictive attributes by using artificial intelligence. In the first week of August, Jetlore announced a new upgrade of their AI-driven prediction platform with the addition of their Content Performance reporting suite, a set of tools designed to give online B2C sellers access to actionable data on their customers’ preferences for products, catalogs, and promotions.

By analyzing every search, click-through, and browse event, Jetlore can map customer behavior to structured predictive attributes and create a unique, holistic profile of each customer. These profiles enable Jetlore clients to mine data critical to maximizing sales opportunities – drilling down to buyer attributes like size, color, fit, style preferences, and even favored brands and materials.

This kind of analysis makes it possible for even large B2C brands to optimize the content in communications with every client, by ranking and predicting the most relevant content at any moment in time. PayPal, eBay and Nordstrom Rack are already using Jetlore’s prediction platform.

Top Retail CRM Solutions

Como, a CRM provider specializing in customer management and loyalty solutions for retail, recently earned a slot on Retail CIO Outlook magazine’s Top 10 Retail CRM Solution Providers of 2017. Como Sense, Como’s product customer engagement platform, is the key technology credited with Como’s success. Como Sense was designed to make it easy for clients to craft personalized loyalty programs for their customers and collect pertinent personal and business data at the same time.

One of Como’s clients is currently in the news, the Point Loma Patient Consumer Co-Operative (PLPCC), because this particular co-op is a walk-in medical marijuana dispensary. With states, soon to include California, moving beyond medical marijuana to legalized recreational pot sales, the PLPCC is already planning seven new locations in the golden state, to be followed by venues nationwide.

PLPCC has already launched a mobile app tied into their customer database, and, with Como Sense, they can control all of the transactional data from point of sale (POS} purchases via the mobile application, as well as any third-party systems, all in one place. By integrating POS with Como Sense, the co-op can now automate tailored sales campaigns for new cannabis medications, flowers, concentrates, and edibles, based on the previous choices made by each consumer.

Customers receive push notifications and pop-up messages linked to daily specials, discounted products, and new catalog items. The mobile app and CRM system have already resulted in a 59 percent higher average purchase amount in the first three months.

Salesforce Customer Service Leads in Forrester Wave Report

The biggest name on the list of Top Retail CRM solutions is Salesforce, and their Salesforce Service Cloud was also honored recently when it was named a leader by Forrester Research in its report on Customer Service Solutions for Enterprise Organizations, Q2 2017. The Salesforce Service Cloud is billed as an AI-powered platform that promises to manage every channel - messaging, video, communities, web chat, in-app, email, phone and even communicating directly with IoT-connected devices.

According to third-party research sponsored by Salesforce, companies that have deployed Service Cloud have seen a 31 percent faster case resolution, a 28 percent increase in agent productivity, 26 percent increase in customer retention, 22 percent decrease in support costs, and a 35 percent increase in customer satisfaction.

Salesforce delivered some spectacular results for their fiscal second quarter 2018, when total Q2 revenues were reported as $2.56 billion, an increase of some 26 percent year-over-year.

About the Author

Henry Kaiser has been reporting on and producing television programming about technology since 1996, first as a producer for CNET and then ZDTV, where he earned a Ziff-Davis Chairman’s Circle award. When ZDTV re-launched as techtv he became Executive Supervising Producer for all primetime production. Henry also created and produced hour-long programming about new technologies for The History Channel.